Customer Experience Strategy: Do This, Not That

Customer experience strategy is the foundation to achieving business results — not only as ROI for your customer experience efforts, but also for your business as a whole. In this season of planning for the new fiscal year, it will pay to get it right.

In a customer experience (CX) conference, several roundtable options were aimed at about a dozen attendees each, yet 57 people — with standing room only — piled into the CX ROI roundtable. The pressure to demonstrate business results is high, but year after year, studies show that less than half of companies aiming for CX excellence actually have a CX strategy! Top obstacles to customer experience success are typically cited as lack of CX strategy, lack of cooperation among organizations, lack of CX processes, and correspondingly, lack of budget.

Top obstacles to the success of customer experience goals — ClearAction Business-to-Business Customer Experience Management Best Practices Study, 2010-2013.

The stunning consequence of customer experience strategy sloppiness is described in the Forrester 2013 State of Customer Experience report: "Despite 90% of respondents saying that CX is a top strategic priority for their firm, a shocking 86% said their companies don’t actually expect to get much value from it."

For other endeavors in business, would we settle for such half-heartedness or incompleteness in our annual operating plans? Whenever the answer is yes, certainly we can agree on a low likelihood of success. But don't throw the baby out with the bathwater just yet — you have an opportunity to be wholehearted and complete going forward!

Here are 3 keys to getting it right for 2015: be holistic, bust silos, and integrate.

1) Be holistic: For something as important as THE source of your company's funding — customers — think big and comprehensively. Piecemeal attempts yield piecemeal results.

DO THIS: Deploy an end-to-end system that connects customers' feedback to internal improvements and innovations, and then to customer engagement. Nothing in business is an island — think of customer experience management as a system of interconnected efforts that must be synchronized and fully deployed before lasting results are reaped.

NOT THAT: A program or technology is not a strategy — market research, CRM, references, engagement, and repurchase/renewal efforts are components that must be connected in order to "move the needle" for CX ROI. Our 4-year study indicates that ongoing coordination among managers of all these CX programs is a CX ROI success factor.

Furthermore, don't forget the "middleware" — customer intelligence connects the dots across disparate sources, customer lifetime value (CLV) prioritizes efforts and motivates action, CX improvement must be systemic to prevent recurrence of issues, CX innovation must be anticipatory of customers' expectations and contribute to customers' capabilities, and engaging internally must be in alignment with all of the above. Our 4-year study shows that this middleware is not typically part of what's considered to be a "CX strategy".

Do: Think of it as centering your business on customers and centering your employees on customers. As the source of your company's lifeblood, why would you center it on anything else?

2) Bust silos: Customers think of a company or brand as &#quot;one&#quot;, so it pays to manage customer experience accordingly.

DO THIS: Get your C-team "on the same page" with customer-centered CX terminology, vision, and strategy. Unify your business units and support functions in their views and roles, and understanding of their joint responsibility for the ripple effect on CX goals of their handoffs and decisions and mindsets.

Align data and methods across your whole company, allowing flexibility as needed to address customers' needs, while simplifying and creating consistency that will serve customers', employees', and shareholders' well-being alike.

NOT THAT: Silos built-in to your CX effort waste a lot of opportunity. While pilots of methodologies and technologies are useful, lay the change management groundwork for pilots to be rolled out horizontally and vertically, to minimize silos in the way you manage customer experience.

The same goes for data, systems, and methods — design it right the first time, and iron-out the legacy kinks. For sustained CX ROI, manage business in the ways that customers need us to portray ourselves.

3) Integrate: Since customers are integral to business success, integrate their viewpoints into everything you do.

DO THIS: Weave CX goals into all of your strategies, plans, rituals, processes, policies, and day-to-day work — at every level of management and across all the business lines, accounts, and support functions. Rituals include staff meetings, ops reviews, all-hands meetings, performance reviews, succession, planning and budgeting, and so forth.

NOT THAT: Customer experience is not an interaction, touch-point, usage instance, event, aura, or domain exclusive to front-line employees. Everything across your company can influence the experience your customers have. Like healthy habits for physical bodies, the best results come when health-centered actions and thinking permeate every aspect of your life. If you want long-lasting CX differentiation and ROI, build it into the way you live.

A sensible approach to CX strategy is what's needed for sustained CX ROI. In fact, companies that view customer experience as a determinant of corporate strategy #8212; rather than a subset of corporate strategy, or unrelated to it #8212; appear to have cracked the nut for drawing strong value from CX efforts. Be holistic, bust silos, and integrate customer experience insights in all you do as you plan your company's future.

Notes:

1. Customer Experience Strategy is one of the six domains in the body of knowledge advocated by the Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA).
2. The concept of “Do This, Not That” is borrowed from the popular book “Eat This, Not That“, where the weaknesses of common practices and myths are brought to light and sensible replacements are recommended.
3. Other articles in this series:
   • Customer-Centered Culture: Do This, Not That
   • Voice of the Customer: Do This, Not That
   • Customer Journey Maps: Do This, Not That

Contact the author, Lynn Hunsaker, to find out how to customize these practices to your situation.

Inspiring Leadership Quotes

#10. Sam Walton:

"Outstanding leaders go out of their way to boost the self-esteem of their personnel. If people believe in themselves, it's amazing what they can accomplish."

#9. Bill Bradley:

"Leadership is unlocking people's potential to become better."

#8. Lao Tzu:

"A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves"

#7. Jack Welch:

"Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others."

#6. Brian Tracy:

"Become the kind of leader that people would follow voluntarily; even if you had no title or position."

#5. Ralph Nadar:

"I start with the premise that the function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers."

#4. Harry S. Truman:

"In reading the lives of great men, I found that the first victory they won was over themselves... self-discipline with all of them came first.."

#3. Bill Gates:

"As we look ahead into the next century, leaders will be those who empower others."

#2. John Quincy Adams:

"If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader."

#1. Vince Lombardi:

"Leaders aren’t born, they are made. And they are made just like anything else, through hard work. And that’s the price we’ll have to pay to achieve that goal, or any goal."

How to measure content marketing ROI

With content marketing budgets rising rapidly, the onus is on marketing directors to demonstrate that these dollars are being designated to the right discipline.

However, research from the Content Marketing Institute has revealed that less than a third of organisations believe they are successful at measuring the return on investment of their content marketing efforts.

Of course, this problem isn’t unique to content marketing - ROI measurement is problematic across the entire marketing discipline, despite growing demands for measurability. As Richard Armstrong, CEO and co-founder of Kameleon, notes: “Measuring campaigns is a difficult concept. If there was a set of numbers that truly showed marketers how well they were doing in their campaigns it would revolutionise the industry. Revenue may show the short-term impact, but it doesn't take into account the long-term effects such as consumer loyalty.”  

However, there is no question that there are some challenges that are specific to content marketing measurement. And as it is rising in prominence, these need to be addressed.

“Many businesses are using content marketing to raise their profile and build awareness and this has historically been a difficult thing to measure,” says Sarah Gavin, European marketing director at Outbrain. “Despite a huge increase in the volume of content marketing, it still remains a fairly new form of marketing for many brands. As such there are no defined metrics for how to accurately measure the ROI of content. The content marketing industry has also been fairly fragmented, with different tools and technologies making the implementation and tracking of campaigns overly complicated.”

If content marketing is to continue to gain prominence in the marketing mix, businesses will have to get a better grasp of ROI measurement in order to ensure that money is being wisely allocated.

So, with that in mind, what advice can the experts share?

Costs

To accurately evaluate your content marketing ROI, you first have to be able to calculate your costs. Content marketing can be divided into five areas where costs are accrued:

• Planning. These are the strategic costs associated with establishing business goals, identifying business goals and generating personas. These tend to be one-off costs.
• Ideation. These are the costs associated with generating a flow of ideas such as mapping buyer journeys and identifying the kinds of assets that will be required. Again, these are largely one-off costs.
• Production. These are the costs associated with creating the content and the editorial plan. These are recurrent costs that will be incurred on every new content campaign.
• Distribution. These are the costs associated with generating traffic, leads and sales through the promotion and nurturing of the content. Again, these will be recurrent costs.
• Measurement. These are the costs associated with the evaluation and optimisation of the content.

With the production and distribution being the two main contributors to costs, it is worth drilling down into these particular areas.

Stephen Bateman, director and co-founder of Wise Up Media and Concentric Dots, has outlined some useful ways of how to evaluate the costs of producing content.

 “Let’s assume your company decides to invest three solid, 600-900 word, blog posts per week, sourced either from experts, or from members of the senior team. A solid blog post takes an average five hours to research, write, and edit.

“Let’s assume that the average annual earnings of a solid blogger (external or on the senior team) is £45,000 annum. If that person works 45 weeks in the year and 48 hours per week their hourly cost is £45,000/2160 hours = £20.83 per hour.

Hourly expense of solid blogger = £20.83 (NB this includes no charges or overhead). Therefore, the cost of one blog post is equal to £20.83 x 5 = £104.15. The annual cost of blogging at this frequency is £104.15 x 3 blogs week = £312.45 x 45 weeks = £14,060.45 per annum (not including overhead).”

Having produced the content, there is also the matter of promoting and nurturing it, whether this is vial activity on social media or through paid promotion via the likes of Google AdWords. Bateman has the following advice for working out promotion costs.

“For the sake of this costing exercise let’s assume two members of your team spend 90 minutes on content promotion per workday, each. Let’s assume that the average annual earnings of a social media / community manager (internal or agency) is £40,000 per annum

Hourly cost of that person is £40,000/2160 hours = £18.52 per hour (without charges or overhead). Therefore, the cost of promoting content is £18.52 x 1.5 x 2 (people) x 225 days = £12,501 per annum (in this case there is no paid content promotion).”

Using these approaches to evaluating costs in production and promotion, as well as adding in costs for measurement and reporting and so on, you can then arrive at a good idea of what costs you are accruing and what activity you need to produce in terms of leads, sales, etc to ensure that you get a positive return. And this brings us to the next stage.

Setting up analytics to estimate your returns

At its most basic level, the principle behind identifying the value of content marketing is identifying and segmenting users who have viewed particular content, categorising their previous familiarity with your brand, and then understanding that user’s behaviour by comparing it to those who have not been exposed to this content. However, while this sounds straightforward, but this type of analysis can be difficult if you’re not sure what you’re looking for, and how to set up analytics to determine that outcome.

“If you want to measure your content marketing ROI but in a way that gets you the most actionable results, you should plan how you’re going to distinguish the users exposed to your content, then track and compare them with users who haven’t,” advises Tom Wood, director at onebite.

“Google Analytics (GA) can help with this; however, most people believe that GA set up finishes once you have implemented the JavaScript. This is untrue - social media links, campaigns, blog posts and other web collateral on your website needs to be tagged properly or viewers of the content will appear as direct traffic, which does not give you insight into how well a piece of content is going. Additionally, content URLs need to be stripped of parameters otherwise they appear multiple times – making the data much more difficult to collate.”

“To counter this, before beginning any campaign or uploading content onto your site, spend a few hours configuring Google Analytics and ensure that all pages and links are properly tagged and tracked – the results will be well worth the investment of your time.”

By conducting analytics into who is viewing your content, you are able to see not only the quantity of people viewing your content but also make qualitative judgments as to whether you’re targeting the right people. This makes judging the ROI of your content much more reliable, says Wood.

“If you want to make the most out of analytics, use content grouping on GA. This is a fantastic tool that allows you to create buckets of site pages and analyse them together rather than separately – making it quicker and easier to make a judgment. It’s pretty straightforward to set up, but depending on the size of your site you may have to implement some additional coding to get the content grouped properly.

“If you’re an ecommerce site then, on a basic level, you can group category pages, product pages, and content pages rather simply. However, if your content is generated at a campaign level, then this allows you to put together content groups for upcoming campaigns in advance. Grouping categories, landing pages or blog pages that form the basis of your content marketing campaigns means you can single out the performance of the content and measure it across benchmark categories that are not linked to your campaign.”

Wood emphasises that to fully understand the analytics you generate from your content, you must first have a complete understanding of who you are trying to target, and most importantly, all the steps that a user might take before becoming a fully-fledged customer. This means not just measuring the bigger pieces of content but also the smaller content interactions that happen on your site, such as newsletter signups, content engagements or any other user actionable functions on your site.

“Once you’ve started to measure these actions, you are able to set goals and start building a more accurate view of what your user looks like.”

Holistic approach

In terms of a more holistic approach, Danyl Bosomworth has composed a simple matrix of ideas to help set KPIs or metrics, providing a useful framework to help select the best type of KPIs for different markets. This model covers the full range of measures covered from hard sales vs softer engagement metrics.

“Using these different types of measures is even more important for companies with long purchase or repeat purchase cycles, such as automotive, furniture or maybe PCs – and certainly for B2B businesses,” he suggests. “The longer buy cycles require the need to demonstrate ongoing engagement.”

The three measures it covers are:

• Commercial measures: These are the harder business or commercial measures and what usually takes the longest to be demonstrable. These are the measures for the senior managers although they may well also need to know about Likes! Think audience share, sales, leads or at least clear indicators from people such satisfaction ratings or % that fed back. Remember that these need to be incremental and ideally attributable to your content marketing. 
• Tactical measures: These include the views, clicks, interactions with your content – so involves the social shares such as Likes and Tweets. You might also use link shortening tools to help measure. These are hard indicators that your content is visible and worth sharing – so very key.
• Brand measures: These are easier for bigger brands or where there’s less competition, simply because the tools seem to work better in that space. Think brand or key-phrase mentions, sentiment, share of market mentions over competitors and certainly site traffic. These are the bigger needles to get moving and often require a bit more momentum.

Armstrong provides some final brief rules of thumb for ROI measurement.

“In a nutshell, marketers need to put a number on it,” he says. “By clarifying the objectives that need to be achieved prior to planning the creative and distribution, they will ensure that the overall campaign is quantifiable.

“Don’t wait until the end of the campaign, real time insight is vital to optimise and make adjustments whilst the campaign is still live.

“Ensure all communication activity is trackable against the objectives. On social for instance, free tools such as Google, Facebook and Twitter analytics provide a wealth of information on how your content is being consumed and whether those targets are being hit.

“Measurement needs to be tailored according to the objectives of the content. If a content programme targeted at brand awareness is implemented, brands need to be looking beyond content consumption metrics such as video views and page views.”

NEIL DAVEY EditorMyCustomer.com

THURSDAY 5 MAR 2015

Science says that charisma can be learned — here are 9 proven strategies

It's not something you're born with.

"Charisma is simply the result of learned behaviors," says Olivia Fox Cobane, author of "The Charisma Myth." 

Use words that people can relate to.

Getty

In his book "Why Presidents Succeed," University of California at Davis psychologist Dean Keith Simonton argues that the most effective communicators use concrete — rather than abstract — language.

"'I feel your pain' has association," he tells the APA Monitor, "but 'I can relate to your viewpoint' doesn't. The most charismatic presidents reached an emotional connection with people talking not to their brains but to their gut."

Express your feelings.

Matt Cardy / Getty

"Charismatic individuals express their feelings spontaneously and genuinely," Claremont McKenna College psychologist Ronald E. Riggio says. "This allows them to affect the moods and emotions of others."

It's called emotional contagion, or "the tendency to automatically mimic and synchronize expressions."

So if you're really excited about something, other people with "catch" that excitement, too.

Talk about your potential — it's more impressive than talking about your accomplishments.

Kevin Winter / Getty

A Stanford-Harvard study recently cited on Marginal Revolution suggests that accomplishments aren't what capture people's attention — rather, it's a person's perceived potential. 

"This uncertainty [that comes with potential] appears to be more cognitively engaging than reflecting on what is already known to be true," the authors write. 

Mirror the person you're speaking to.

flickr user Ed Yourdan

Psychologists have found that when two people are getting along, they start to mirror each other's bodies as a sign of trust and safety. Your date crosses their legs, so do you; you take a sip of water, so does your date. 

If you want to do better in a negotiation, the research says to mimic your opponent's behavior.

Walk the same rate as other people — they'll think you're friendly.

Flickr / vonderauvisuals

In a Durham University study, students were shown video clips of 26 other students walking — some with looser gaits, some tighter. 

Just a few steps were needed to give a sense of personality. Students equated looser gaits with extroversion and adventurousness, while the more clipped walkers were seen as neurotic.

A University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign study on walking speeds showed that guys match women's walking paces if they're attracted to them.

Keep your hands and torso open to signal that you're welcoming.

Charles Roffey / flickr

Body language experts agree that posture speaks louder than words. 

Keeping your hands stuffed in your pockets and your shoulders turned inward sends the signal that you're not interested. But talking with your hands and standing in an open stance shows that you're available. 

Bring a dog with you, since it makes you look nurturing.

Roel Wijnants / Getty

In a University of Michigan experiment, women read vignettes about men. Whenever the story featured a person who owned a dog, women rated them with higher long-term attractiveness.

The researchers concluded that owning a pet signaled that you're nurturing and capable of making long-term commitments. It also makes you appear more relaxed, approachable, and happy. 

Smile more.

Larry Busacca / Getty

In two experiments, researchers in Switzerland examined the relationship between attractiveness and smiling.

They found that the stronger the smile, the more attractive a face looked. 

In fact, a happy facial expression compensated for relative unattractiveness.

Get people to talk about themselves.

Jeff J Mitchell / Getty

According to Harvard research, talking about yourself stimulates the same brain regions as sex or a good meal. 

"Activation of this system when discussing the self suggests that self-disclosure ... may be inherently pleasurable," Scientific American reports. 

And when people talk about their experiences, they become more vulnerable to one another, and when they become more vulnerable to one another, they form social bonds and coinvest in one another's welfare. 

• DRAKE BAER
 
•    

• MAR. 5, 2015, 12:38 PM

Почему кукла Барби потеряла популярность

У производителя известных на весь мир сексапильных кукол компании Mattel трудные времена. The Village выяснил, в чём причина

На выставке игрушек в Нюрнберге 27 января Барби была на высоте — в прямом смысле. Компания Mattel представила новую версию куклы — на этот раз в плаще и маске супергероини неизменного ярко-розового цвета. Приглашённая девушка-каскадёр летала над зритерями на акробатической лонже. Эта новинка — очередная попытка Mattel привлечь внимание современных девочек, которые любят комиксы с супергероями не меньше мальчиков. В последнее время дела компании идут не очень удачно — из-за этого недавно был уволен директор Брайан Стоктон. The Village разобрался, в чём проблема кукол, о которых когда-то мечтали все девочки.

  Сексуальная игрушка

Mattel появилась в послевоенном 1945 году. Среди её основателей — мебельщик Элиот Хандлер, его жена Рут и Гарольд Мэтсон. Название компании было образовано от имён двух мужчин (Мэтт и Элиот), но через несколько лет Мэтсон покинул компанию. Ещё до войны Хандлер экспериментировал с мебелью из разных видов пластика. В новой компании он вместе с партнёрами занялся изготовлением рам для картин. Они также делали кукольную мебель — из отходов производства. Вскоре стало понятно, что детская мебель пользуется большей популярностью, и предприниматели сконцентрировали свои силы на ней.

Бизнес шёл неплохо, особенно хорошо продавались игрушечные укулеле. Однажды Рут, наблюдая за своей дочерью Барбарой, заметила, что она играет с бумажными куклами, представляя, что они взрослые. Предпринимательница подумала, что куклы из пластика могли бы пользоваться популярностью — можно было бы сделать их похожими на взрослых женщин, выпускать для них одежду и аксессуары. Но Элиот сказал, что «ни одна мать не позволит дочери играть с грудастой куклой». Тогда она привезла из Европы куклу Лилли в стиле пин-ап (правда, она была скорее сувениром, а не игрушкой), переработала её дизайн и убедила мужа попробовать.

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Барби, названная в честь дочери Хандлеров, дебютировала на нью-йоркской выставке игрушек в 1959 году. Она стала невероятно популярной, благодаря рекламе в клубе Микки-Мауса — это телешоу как раз начал показывать Disney. В первый год предприниматели продали более 350 тысяч кукол по три доллара каждая. Вскоре у неё появился друг Кен, тёзка сына Хандлеров.

  Амбициозная кукла

«Каждой девочке нужна кукла, чтобы мечтать о будущем, — говорила Рут. — Было бы глупо представлять себя взрослой, но без груди, так что я сделала кукле красивую грудь». Кроме того, Барби всегда старалась следовать моде: носила причёску, как у Жаклин Кеннеди, дружила с темнокожей девушкой во времена борьбы с расизмом. Она постоянно меняла профессии: была то космонавтом, то врачом, то медсестрой, то няней, то балериной.

Вместе с успехом на куклу обрушился шквал феминистической критики. Активистки движения за права женщин говорили о том, что кукла с нереальными пропорциями формирует у девочек низкую самооценку — некоторые из них мучают себя диетой для приближения к недостижимому идеалу. Эксперты подсчитали, что при росте 175 сантиметров объём груди Барби составил бы 91 сантиметра, бёдер — 84 сантиметра, талии — всего 46 сантиметров. Шансы встретить такую женщину — 1 к 100 000.

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 «Философия Барби заключается в том, что через игру в куклы девочка может себя представить кем угодно, — настаивала Рут. — Барби всегда была доказательством того, что женщина может многого добиться». В 1960 году компания Mattel вышла на нью-йорскую биржу, через пять лет её продажи перевалили за 100 миллионов долларов и она вошла в список Fortune500. Сейчас в ней работает 28 тысяч человек, годовая выручка составляет 6,5 миллиарда долларов.

  Недетские потери

Но продажа доли инвесторам принесла Хандлерам и проблемы. В 1974 году новый менеджмент отстранил Рут от руководства, а позже обвинил в махинациях с отчётностью. Суд приговорил её к общественным работам и оштрафовал.

Оставшись без основателей, Mattel попыталась выйти на рынок компьютерных игр, но потерпела неудачу и в 1983 году оказалась на грани банкротства. Тогда её спасла группа венчурных инвесторов. Было решено сконцентрироваться на основном продукте, игрушках. Помимо Барби, компания выпускала популярные машинки Hot Wheels. Она возобновила сотрудничество с Disney и стала сокращать издержки. Это дало результат: продажи пошли вверх, компания догнала своего конкурента Hasbro.

Но в новом тысячелетии кукла опять столкнулась с проблемами. На рынке появилось немало интересных игрушек и развлечений для детей. Барби казалась устаревшей — девочки умоляли своих родителей купить им кукол Winx или Bratz. К работе самой компании тоже было немало вопросов. В 2011 году компанию обвинили в промышленном шпионаже, а год назад — в эксплуатации рабочих на китайских фабриках.

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Недавно Mattel постигла ещё одна неудача: Disney передал право выпускать кукол по мотивам мультфильма «Холодное сердце» компании Hasbro. Производитель Барби мог заработать на них примерно 300 миллионов долларов. На днях рейтинговое агентство Moody's поставило на пересмотр с негативным прогнозом инвестиционный рейтинг Mattel. Причина — слабые продажи и низкая выручка в последний год. Из-за этого же уволили директора компании Брайана Стоктона.

Похоже, для возвращения былой славы Mattel действительно нужны сверхспособности Барби-супергероини.

5 Questions That Reveal Company Culture

Job seekers know they should find a company that’s the right cultural fit. A company, that is, that’s a good match for their own motivations, values, attitudes, desires, skills and goals.

Much easier said than done. During a job interview, asking about a company’s mission will elicit responses that generally range from blank stares to a rambling collection of clichés. We work hard and play hard. We’re committed to excellence. We’re driven to provide outstanding service to our customers.

And so on.

You’re not going to learn much going that route. A better strategy:  Figure out which aspects of workplace cultureare most important to you, and then ask targeted interview questions designed to reveal those aspects.

Listen carefully to the replies. No kidding, right? But most people, particularly in nerve-wracking situations, are thinking about their own answers and their next question rather than what someone else is saying. Evaluating a culture requires that you pay close attention so you ask the right follow-up questions—and read between the lines.

You have to watch carefully, too. Take note of a person’s expression and body language. By going off the typical interview script and watching how people react, you’ll learn far more than you will from airbrushed images on a website.

Of course, you need to use your judgment. Some questions you might ask at a start-up won’t go over well in a very buttoned-down environment. Come to think of it, how comfortable you feel asking about the things that matter to you is a pretty good indicator of how well you’ll fit on a team.

What about the company’s mission most motivates you? Go ahead and read those mission statements (generally buried on the company’s website) but it’s far better to hear how the people you’ll be working with describe that mission. This question zeroes in on the aspect of the culture that most matters to employees. If everyone you ask has a similar take, you’ll know management communicates its culture pretty well and that most folks buy into it. Getting a bunch of different answers may mean a more individualistic environment or a company that’s lost its way. And it’s a good way to find out if the team you’ll be working with shares your own motivations.

If your company were a car, what kind would it be? It’s hardly shocking now, but in 1981, when anchorwoman Barbara Walters asked Katherine Hepburn what kind of tree she would be, if she were a tree, Walters was widely ridiculed. But she was right that mixing some abstract questions with more concrete ones can give you a more complete picture of a situation or person. Plus, they lighten the mood. Asking team members to compare their company to a car, movie, or book can give you a glimpse of people’s personalities. Hepburn, by the way, was an oak.

What setbacks did you experience when you launched your last product? No one likes to talk aboutmistakes and obstacles, but no process always runs smoothly. A big part of culture is how a team handle setbacks. Do people seem uncomfortable being honest or seem to blame one another for any obstacles? You might be dealing with a culture in which people don’t take risks or one steeped in politics.

What are you afraid of?  I like this question because it surprises people. And though it is a rare person who can respond quickly or honestly, you’ll get a read on a person’s temperament, thoughtfulness, and self-awareness. You’ll also get a sense of how optimistic people really are about the company’s prospects and what they consider the weak spots of the business or team (which also helps you position yourself as the person who can help).

What do you think of Google’s culture? (Or Zappos? Or Trader Joe’s or any other company with a strong, well-known culture.) People often speak more freely about other companies than they will about their own. You’ll get a sense of what they aspire to and what aspects of a culture they consider important or trivial. Hear a lot of negativity? A little criticism is fine, but if someone spews negative comments, be careful. They may be unhappy with their own company. And it’s likely that one day, that negativity will be focused on you.

By Susan Price